3 Lessons On How To Become A Viral Brand In 4 Short Years
Billie Eilish is an 18-year old pop star who’s grown a 52.9 million fan base within 4 short years.
I think Billie’s the perfect case study of what to do when creating a new brand, especially if you’re launching your small business in current times.
Between 2017 and 2018, Billie Eilish’s Instagram audience grew from 257K to 6.3 million. At the time of this piece, she’s now at 52.9 million followers.
In my opinion, her insane audience growth is a result of branding that you’re either mesmerized by or absolutely loathe. She’s polarizing, and it works.
Below are three ways…
Are you blocking your business’ growth by choosing customers you’re comfortable selling to?
Building a business is an intense act of vulnerability, so it’s no surprise that the additional step of moving out of your customer comfort zone feels like a layer of uneasiness you’d like to avoid.
To me, a customer comfort zone is a style of customer acquisition that feels comfortable because of its predictability and ease. Customer comfort zones include congregating family and friends as the majority of your customer base, heavily relying on referrals from said friends and family, and leaning on these channels to feed your business’ sales for the foreseeable future.
You eventually run out of friends…
When to quit and when to stay — what to do if you’re having second thoughts about keeping your business.
It’s hard to know when to call it quits on your business.
Whether your business is extremely stressful to manage or sales aren’t taking off at the level you’d like it to, you may be thinking about calling it quits and whether it’s the right move to make.
When you’ve put a tremendous amount of time and effort into building a business, your ability to pinpoint when it’s time to tap out becomes foggy because your emotions add heaviness around leaving.
So it gets hard to call it. It becomes difficult to balance your heart’s opinions from your brain’s, and…
Why the “be authentic” brand strategy may not be working for your business.
If you’ve been exposed to your fair share of business advice online, I’m sure that the marketing advice you’re tired of hearing and may be genuinely perplexed by is to be authentic or just be yourself.
When did building a profitable business equate to showing up on Instagram or Twitter to talk about your opinions? Also, how much authentic sharing is too much? Will people think you’re out of line or are being unprofessional if you really act like your authentic self behind closed doors? Will you come off as an oversharer if you open the authenticity box?
In a…
Delays and challenges experienced by founders of color and its impact on their startups.
Building a business is a monumental journey that has been written about in plenty of popular business books, but often from one perspective — the white male. If you Google what the most popular business books are right now, the following people will show up: James Clear, Tim Ferriss, Ben Horowitz, Dale Carnegie, Simon Sinek, Phil Knight — all white and male authors.
As a BIPOC individual, it has been my experience that the playbooks and success stories of white businessmen are to be read with a heavy caveat of privilege, privilege that I will not be able to access…
Why Instagram is today’s best sales floor.
There are 7-figure businesses right now that don’t have a website and sell their products or services only through Instagram.
The reason for this is because Instagram is a high-ROI digital sales floor embedded with community, trust, and enticing sales tools to aid businesses. Instagram is in my opinion, today’s version of the QVC channel.
Although I don’t recommend setting up a permanent storefront on Instagram as a long-term plan without putting up real estate anywhere else (like a website or an email list), I do see Instagram as a key sales driver for a lot of modern businesses.
Instagram…
Not all business coaches know what they’re doing — here are the telltale signs.
If you’ve worked with business coaches before, whether through 1-on-1 sessions, group coaching, or a course, you may have had healthy exposure to coaches that made you feel worse rather than wonderful about the state of your business. Or, you may have received business advice that was unhelpful, maybe even detrimental to the progress of your business.
Real talk: there are business coaches out there that don’t know what they’re doing and take a lot of innocent businesses down with them through their lack of experience.
When business owners seek help, they defer to the experts to guide them. The…
3 important design thinking teachings that’ll give you a competitive edge.
When I reflect on what has given me my edge over the years as an entrepreneur and as an advisor to startups, I always come back to the tools I’ve pulled from the design thinking methodology. It has largely informed my unique concoction of my special sauce, aka my competitive edge.
Design thinking has been an important asset to me and has informed the build of each business I’ve built over the course of 14 years. …
3 guiding questions to turn your brand into one that provokes customer action.
If you’re a newer business, it’s likely that auditing your brand hasn’t been high on your priority list. Slapping a logo on your brand and having enough content to fill up your weekly channel drop may feel like it’s enough to have a working, effective brand. You may feel like things are in a good place because you’re putting content out there and saying something.
Having something to say without strong ROI or strategic intent behind it is in my opinion, a solid waste of time. …
When is showing yourself too much for your business?
Every business owner comes across the crossroads of identity early in the process of building out their business. There is a lingering question of how much to reveal, how much to integrate the founder’s story into a business, and when it’s all too much.
This is an important question to ponder if you care about optimizing your online storefronts so that you don’t leave money at the table or lose sales. Omitting or neglecting your personal story from your brand’s narrative is the biggest sales mistake you can make, in my humble opinion.
Ignoring the importance of a founder’s/founding team…
Sophia Sunwoo
I create moneymaking brands with womxn entrepreneurs who refuse to settle for mediocre. www.ascent-strategy.com
